EP1 Hailey Taymore Brown

At 20 years old, Hailey lost her father. Her grief was put on hold as she dealt with an unstable mother and her father's insolvent estate. It took her seven years to speak about her final conversation with her father and his rejection of her last attempt at connection. Listen as Hailey introduces her inspiration for the Voicemails for the Dead podcast and shares her story.

Guest Host: Lorne Fultonberg

Voicemails for the Dead is a podcast centering stories of complex and disenfranchised grief. 

Transcript

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(phone ringing) (phone ringing) 

- Hello friend, you've reached Voicemails for the Dead. Please leave your message after the tone.


- Hey everyone, you're listening to Voicemails for the Dead and I'm Lorne Fultonburg doing this special pilot episode and I'm here with the creator of Voicemails for the Dead. - I'm Hailey Taymore Brown and for better or for worse, this was my idea. 


- We're gonna play your voicemail in a minute here but I wanted to ask you first about creating this show and starting this project.


 - This project has been a really long time coming for me.

Death was always something that was really present in my life from a very young age. My mom, she has been disabled my whole entire life. She was always someone who kind of needed to prepare me and my sister for these feelings of, oh well, I'm gonna die soon or death is gonna right around the corner for me. So I definitely think I was socialized into perceptions of death in a way that's maybe not super traditional for like your middle class white American girl.

Even though someone is gone, it doesn't mean that your relationship to them is over or that you have to stop your understanding of that person or your relationship to that person. You are fully entitled to your feelings and emotions about a person after they die, whatever those feelings and emotions might be. 

- Right, this podcast is about grief but more specifically, it's about complex grief. People stay with you but that could be for better or for worse. 

- Absolutely, once I was introduced to death with the death of my father when I was 20, it was the first time that I had that opportunity to kind of directly compare notes as to my perceptions versus other people's perceptions and the things that I was hearing from the world around me didn't sit well with me. I didn't agree with a lot of what I was hearing and I didn't find space for how I was feeling. 

- And so for this podcast, we're asking people to record voicemails to the people that they have lost, telling them things that they've thought of that are unresolved, what they would want to tell them. 


- In our society, there's only a couple of acceptable ways that are really publicized and communicated about and widely distributed as to how you handle your grief. And in many ways, I think you can put someone up on a pedestal, like that's allowed. If someone did something really atrocious, maybe you can find some solace in their death, but there's very little of the in-between spaces and that's where most of us live, is in those in-between spaces of grief. And I also feel that death is a unique experience of grief. It's permanent and in some senses, it's really one-sided. So it gives us a lot of opportunity to really ground into how do we actually feel within our grief because the other narrative, the other person, the other storyline in its own singular existence isn't relevant anymore. 

- We're gonna play your voicemail here in a second, Hailey and you lost your dad about 10 years ago at this point, but you recorded this voicemail about three years ago. So seven years after the death of your dad, COVID and pandemic and all that stuff, put it on hold. And so in this voicemail, you're gonna hear references to Neils, who is one of your dad's friends and also Arielle who is your sister. And so we'll play this and then we'll talk about it. 

(gentle music) 

- Hey, dad, it's me,Hailey Part of me really can't believe that it's actually been seven years. What have I been doing living without you for seven years? But part of me wonders how different, I guess this really is, how different is it that you're not on the same earth as me than when you were living in the same house, existing two rooms over, being completely oblivious to my existence.

You cared more about the outcome of a sports game than who your daughter was growing up to be. It's one thing to live without a living father and another to live with a father who while physically present, couldn't care less about you. I tried 20 years as a former and I'm on seven-ish of the latter. And I wish I felt the two were more different. You might not remember this, but when you were in hospice, everyone got the chance to come and say their goodbyes. I was the last person, the nurses even waited to give you your medication so that you'd be a bit more awake.

I wanna read to you what I said that morning.


 Daddy, I wasn't really sure how to start this. In reality, I don't really understand the idea of goodbye. It's funny actually, Niels and I were talking and over the past few weeks, I've realized how similar we are. I was talking with Arielle yesterday and she mentioned how she got to say goodbye to you and it could simply be that I'll miss you. I guess it makes me sad that we don't have a relationship, that that's all we need to say. I feel like there's so much more that could be talked about. That's really why I guess I wrote this, to see if maybe I could get some of it out now. I know that for the rest of my life, things are going to come up. Aspects of our relationship are going to be mimicked and shadowed within my other relationships. But it seems like all that baggage is something I'll just have to deal with then. It's been nice these past few weeks as I'm sure it will continue to, that I'm learning so much about who you are. And I know that you don't know that much about who I am, but maybe that isn't the end of the world. I know through the rest of my life, I'll be able to carry a part of you with me and not allow myself to succumb to some of the weaknesses we both share. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think I'll be fine. All the baggage, all the problems, I wanna know and talk about with you will be sorted out in time. You are my father and even though at times I don't think I had a childhood that allows me to know what that word means, I love you.


That was the day I lost my father. 

That was the day you orphaned me to the world, not the four days later when your body ceased breathing. I would have given anything for you to have died in that moment. 

To think your resolution of our relationship was what you needed to be able to move on.

But no, no, you simply rolled your body over, turned your back to me and told me to leave. You stripped me of my right to closure. You left me feeling that not only would I not have a father on this planet in a few days, I never truly had one to begin with.

It's taken me seven years to create something out of your absence and I don't know if I will ever stop trying to be worthy of the love you could not give me, but here it is. This is for you, Dad. Welcome to Voicemails for the Dead.


(gentle music)

 - I'm kind of impressed with myself.


 - It's been three years since you recorded this and heard it. Why do you say impressed with yourself?



 - It's, nice to be able to see that genuine vulnerability and how I, I guess was willing to be that honest.


 I go, oh yeah, like what if I could just tell my 15 year old self all these different things. But I feel like my like 27 year old self just told me some interesting things.



 - Like what?



 - I think the anger, and the mixture of like angry sad emotions that's relevant in the latter part of the voicemail, because the piece that I read, what I said to him, when he was in hospice that day, I have actually looked at that piece again. I've toyed with it in other forms in writing and have tried to like find meaning it in different ways. And I think the thing that's so sort of heartbreaking about the voicemail in and of itself is the fact that it speaks the correct ending. The 20 year old me who wrote what she wanted to do to her dying father. 

 - The goodbye.

 - Yes, really wanted to find like a happy ending. Like not the fairy tale happy ending, but like to find, to spin reality in a way that had some joy to it. And I think I was hopeful in those moments that the living him could be redeemed. I think the fact that the voicemail shows that in seven years, I entitled myself to be angry.


 - I was gonna ask you about including that goodbye that you wrote to him, because he'd heard it before, before receiving this voicemail, so to speak. Did you feel like he needed to hear it again?



 - Yeah, I think when I've told people about that experience of telling him something on his death bed and him responding and saying nothing besides to leave, everyone loves to make up an excuse. And the biggest one is drugs and sort of the end of life experience, right? He was on morphine for about 11 days at that point.


 We can know the science of what that does to someone.


 He was also very ready to die. I remember him saying every day felt like Groundhog Day and he was just waiting for the one that he wouldn't wake up, which I'm not gonna lie was kind of offensive when you're still trying to figure out what your relationship is to the person, when you're still trying to create opportunity for yourself to kind of say goodbye, like find those words.


 So it seemed like he was ready to leave well before I got the opportunity to say goodbye to him. So I think the reason why I reread it in the voicemail was because I don't believe that he did really hear me. Or if he did, he zoned out because it wasn't something that maybe he could reconcile in the amount of time that he had left. And like, I don't know, maybe this was cruel to like say those kinds of things, but it was absolutely my truth and I think I just thought that he would want to know that.


 And we can obviously only like suppose with his response and reaction to it,I don't think he was particularly pleased. So I think maybe part of this process was really just to say like that is actually still, but I wanna give respect to the 20 year old self that really wanted to be heard.

 - Do you think of that goodbye had gone differently if you had felt more heard that you would have grieved differently? 

 - Absolutely. I am definitely someone who emotionally compartmentalizes a lot.

 - You said that in the voicemail like your dad did.

 - Exactly. Definitely some like disassociation that happens there. I think when it comes to how this grief process happened for me, it cannot be discounted that my mother was in a state of psychosis at this time as well. And we, and when I say we, I'm speaking about my sister, Arielle and myself, didn't have external support. There really wasn't a ton of adults in our lives that could help. And so for me, when he passed, and even during his time in hospice, which was only two weeks, we basically had to do everything on our own. Like my sister and me were the executors of his estate, power of attorney, all of that. We had a lot to do. Arielle didn't do a ton logistically.

 And for me, I think I rationalized that as she lost a father.

 My sister and my father were incredibly close, which is part of what makes the relationship dynamic complicated because he was capable of being a father to someone. He just was not a father to me. So I took care of everything. I kind of just said, these feelings, these emotions, they can wait.


 They'll show up later. I'll deal with them later because what was right in front of me was closing my father's business and figuring out how to settle an insolvent estate and managing my mother's suicidal psychosis. I just had too much else on my plate to kind of deal with the emotional part of his death at that point in time.


 And I do think that if he had responded differently initially, it may have made that easier for me to at least start the grieving process. But because we ended in this space of anger and unresolved, it was like too big of a pill to swallow at that point in time. Like it needed to be munched on in very little bits. It really took seven years for me to be able to feel like I could be really honest with myself about how I felt about the grieving process.

 - You said that you were trying to make something of the grief. What did you do to try to connect with him, to try to do something about it during those seven years?

 - What's coming to mind first, is how I wouldn't shy away when he did come into memory.

 For example, I moved to Alaska shortly after he passed away to some extent as a way, a form of survival to handle my mother's situation.


 And I was on a glacier with some friends and there was a mountain biker and my father was a huge mountain biker. Pretty much his whole entire life. Like that's what I remember him doing was like playing hockey and mountain biking every single night of the week, every single weekend. His car smelled so bad.

 - Those hockey bags are not great.

 - No, no, that is very much like the smell of my childhood.

 - I'm so sorry to hear that.

 - Yeah, the smell of my childhood, like carpools and things. Cause my dad did drive us a lot. That was actually like a very important part of his like parenting to me. Like the reason why I wasn't completely null and void. Like what I can say, like, what did your father really do for you? Like he drove me, like he was a great car. Like, oh, and he's fantastic at directions. Car GPS, both very good things that he was capable of doing. Also inherited some nice traits from him including like athletic ability and some things like that. So I was on a glacier. This was about nine-ish months after his death. And I met this mountain biker on a glacier. And if you're feeling like that's insane, it's cause it is, you know, you can easily, you need to be really careful walking on glaciers. You know, you can fall, you know, that kind of stuff happens. 

  And, but to me, this was a reminder of him, a reminder of the person that he was. And to some extent, maybe if I didn't perceive him as just a father and really started to try to shift my perspective to just see him as a human, how maybe I could start to process some more of these feelings. As a human, he absolutely would have been someone who would mountain bike on a glacier. And that's cool, right? You don't see someone mountain biking on a glacier and you're like, that person's not interesting so to some extent, like my father must be interesting, must have been interesting. I just didn't get the opportunity to see that. There were instances like that. Skiing was a big thing that we did together. And so when I would go skiing after he passed, I would sometimes be reminded of him. Usually like I'd be sitting on the chairlift, typically by myself and someone would probably like pull out a pack of Twizzlers or something. And that's like what he always used to like feed us on the chairlift was Twizzlers. And I would just sit with the thought of him, with the presence of him, which is something that I was never really aware of as a kid. He was just there, but to inhabit space with him wasn't something that I was particularly conscious of.

 - Did these reminders help or hurt your grieving process?

 - I would say help. I also like, at that point, I don't know if I even had a grieving process. Like my process was just don't run away when you have these thoughts about him. Something that might be surprising is just how little I actually thought of him. Like I think about this in comparison to like grieving relationships.

 - Romantic relationships.

 - Yes, well, even friendships too sometimes, but particularly romantic relationships when you get out of them and you had this habit with this person, right? All these habits that were instilled. And then you get constantly reminded of that person and those habits. Like they're just so deeply associated and ingrained in your mind that, you know, you might think about someone every single day still or multiple times a day, still, you know, well past when you've broken up.


 Just, I rarely thought of him.

 And I think some of that's because we didn't necessarily have those habits and associations.


 - Grieving is so personal and individualized and I've known that firsthand as well. It really helped me when someone understood what I was going through. And I wanted to ask you about your grief along with the people who were biologically closest to you, your mom and your sister, who it sounds like had different grieving processes than you, not uncommon necessarily. Did you have trouble finding someone who understood the grieving process that you were going through?

 - Absolutely, hilariously, the person who understood it the most, the quickest was not an actual human being that I ever spoke to. I read the book "Wild" by Cheryl Strayed shortly after my father passed. It was about a month after he passed. And I love reading and during this time period and when he passed, I couldn't read, I couldn't read anything. And I couldn't read what I normally would read for joy which was typically science fiction. And a friend's father gave me a copy of "Wild." I don't think he really even thought about it. It was just like he had an extra copy and he was like, "Oh, this is a cool book, you can take it." So the person who understood me the most in this space was Cheryl Strayed, was her relationship to grieving her mother at a young age. And I think some of why it felt so helpful was the fact that it wasn't so cut and dry. It allowed me to realize I was allowed to have an identity within the grieving process because she very much has an identity as a divorcee, as a drug addict.


 Oftentimes, if I'd like tell people like, "Oh, my father died," or things like that, they'd be like, "Oh, my God, that's so hard." Or maybe, "That must've been the worst day of your life."

 And it wasn't.

 The situation with my mother completely overshadowed my father's death, my mother not really being mentally capable of caring for herself.


 And watching her grieve was interesting. My parents were separated at the time of his death. They had a very tumultuous relationship.

 She was so entitled to her grief, so entitled to her grief that I felt like I didn't have space for mine. And with my sister, we didn't have a relationship growing up. So at least nothing like, I didn't really know her super well. I knew how she treated me. She was like, "Fine, I guess." But we didn't really have a connection. We weren't friends, I'll put it that way.


 And we became very close after my father's death. She tried really hard. She was like, "Okay, you are my only family left. We are going to be connected."

 - That's interesting to me, despite the differences, the immense differences. You wrote this nice long thing for your dad as he was on his death bed. She said, "I'll miss you." You said he had a much closer relationship with her than he did with you. And yet you were able to find some sort of commonality in your grief.

 - I don't know if it was in our grief as much as just in our lives.


 I think Arielle's grief looks very different to mine.

 She's, for once, a very different person than I am. What's funny and interesting about this is that we became very close. In spite of our difference in grief process. And to be perfectly honest, we don't actually talk about grieving our father very much. I wouldn't necessarily talk to my sister on Father's Day because they felt very different days.

 Yeah, I don't really usually talk to my mom or my sister on those days because it feels like my relationship to him was so different. I don't think I've ever said this before, but I wasn't exactly jealous of my sister's relationship with my father, but I wasn't exactly not jealous either. - Yeah.


 It's sort of, to me, it was almost like when you see someone on TV and they have their life and you are like, "Oh, wouldn't that be cool?" But it's on television. That's so far removed from me. How weird.

 That's kind of how it felt. Yet we're talking about people who lived in the exact same house.

 - Do you feel like you're grieving now?

 - Yeah, definitely.

 I think 10 years out, I'm still understanding some of the grief. And I think for me, it's part of this process of indulging in my curiosity with him. I've kind of let go of this, "Why couldn't you be a good father to me?" I wouldn't say fully. I definitely still have anger and other emotions.


 But I'm more kind of intrigued by who was this person because I did hear during the memorial service that we put on for him, during people just talking about him and the stories and how everyone just throws stories at you when someone's died and they're just like, "Here, let me tell you about all the amazing things." Or even the language that people use. I'm sure your father loved you so much. When people would say that to me, "Oh, it was grating. It was always grating." And I knew that these people were so well-intentioned. But there isn't actually a ton of evidence to support that he loved me so much. Or when things would happen and people would be like, "Oh, I'm sure your father would be really proud of you."


 I'm not sure he would be really proud of me. I didn't have any previous evidence to state that he would have been really proud of me. I think people really don't know how to respond to death. And so they try their best. And I think part of the reason why people don't know how to respond to death is because we don't talk about it, which is some of the point of this. How could I make something good out of the situation that I was given with him?

 I think one of the biggest things that it did came about a year later when a friend of mine, so this is a very good friend of mine, a friend of hers who was an acquaintance to me, her father died very suddenly in a car accident. And my friend Jamie basically said to her, "I don't know what to say right now, but I know who does." And that person is Hailey and she basically connected the two of us and was like, "What I could do is I could then talk to a peer and I could say, these are all the horrible things that people are gonna say to you." Like this is one from my experience was, "Oh, my hamster died once."


 (laughs) - Trying to find some sort of comparison.

 - Yeah, and I think a big one is also like, "Oh, my grandfather died last year. I know how you feel."


 Maybe, depending on your relationship with your grandfather, but highly unlikely. So I was talking with this woman, this acquaintance of mine from college, we must have been 21-ish at the time. And to be able to have her say back to me, thank you so much for being able to have a conversation, to be able to just air out the fact you are entitled to be angry. You are entitled to wanna rip everyone's head off when they're trying to say nice things to you. Probably don't, but trying to kind of give advice, I guess, in this space of, I've been there too, with regards to all the things that it feels like other people do wrong and all of the boxes that they try to squish you in with their comments, right? That comment of, "I'm sure your dad would be so proud of you," is trying to put you in this little box of acceptability.



 - Yeah, it's tidy, simple stuff for presumably simple grief. 

- Exactly, people like it when things are digestible. To be able to help other people feel entitled to their undigestible grief was, I think, the biggest gift that that experience gave me and has continued to give.

 - Did anyone say anything that was helpful to you?

 - Yeah, there was acquaintance from high school who I didn't really know very well. He did live a quarter mile down the road from me, but we were just never close. We were just never really that close of friends. And I remember in high school, we were in BC calculus class together, and he was gone for months, and everyone was sort of like, "What happened?" And his mother was dying of cancer, and I didn't know that at the time. I only found out about that after the fact. And a different friend of mine, Liza, who was close to this man, sort of said, "Hey, maybe you should talk to him after my dad died," or maybe it was even while he was dying. 

He was the first person who said to me, "You don't need to feel a particular type of way about this." I think what he specifically spoke to with his experience with his mother was the fact that it is really reasonable to have a sense of relief when someone is finally gone. So that comment that he had made, it's okay to be relieved when someone passes. Like, you don't just always have to be sad. That was really amazing for me to hear. 

 And there were some other people who said really helpful things and did support in different ways. Weirdly enough, right after it had happened, a bunch of my friends put together like a cute little gift basket for me with food and different things. That was really sweet. This was mostly orchestrated by my friend Liza's mother, who was incredibly supportive of me. A friend of mine's brother, who I was also close with, he gave me his favorite flannel, and he just put it in the basket. That, to me, was like... He got it. He got the fact that there was nothing he could say that would make anything better. To him, there's something that just worked that allowed him to give me his favorite flannel that he knew that I loved, and then I just had this thing. That was weirdly more helpful than any quiche that anyone could have baked me, or any kind word, or pat on the back.

 - So when you meet someone who's lost someone close to them, how do you approach it?

 - I think there's an unspoken respect that I immediately have for the person. I guess how I approach it is from the perspective of I want these people to know that they have community, like that they have space, and that I'm happy to. It actually literally brings me joy to create space for these people's experience. It's not loud. It's like a very quiet companionship that you're kind of trying to court out of the person. I am familiar with it, and I'm not going to say those horrible things to you that other people like to say, like "My hamster died once." 

- You said in your voicemail, "I think I'll be fine. All the baggage, all the problems and things I want to know and talk about with you will be sorted out in time." Have they been sorted out? Do you still believe that that is true?

 - I still think the fundamental premise of it is true. How I'm thinking about this now as like an almost 30 year old is I was stepping away from attachment to him.

 I was giving myself permission not to need him.

 I don't know if I had the language at all points in time during this process. I mean, I certainly know I didn't have it when I was 20, but I needed to give myself permission to be whole without him.


 And I think I needed to also give myself permission to be whole without the childhood or like the childhood father that I could have had within him. I think that was my rationalization. Like that was my like 20 year old defense. And it was, there's a little bit of defense there. Like I am putting up a little bit of a wall, which to be perfectly honest, like I think that's healthy.


 And I do feel like that to some extent, yeah, that is true. Like the reality of the situation is always what you can learn from the most. So I didn't wanna tell myself this narrative of like, oh, my father really loved me. I just misunderstood him, which maybe that was true, but I don't have, I don't know that. At least at this point in time in my life, I don't have reason to believe that. I also in theory could talk to my father's friends. I could learn more about how he actually felt about me. Yeah, I will be fine because the reality of the childhood that I lived, the reality of the 20 years with him that I lived is enough for me to move forward.


 - After you poured your heart out to your dad there and he rolled over and rearranged his pillows, you felt like he had stripped you of your right to closure. What does closure mean to you? And do you feel like you found it?

 - I think there's different types of closure. And I think everything that's about to come out of my mouth, I'm probably gonna feel differently about in like five years. I think I've worked on closure within myself. I think the reason why I said that, you know, I was stripped of closure is there was no longer the storyline with the two main characters walking side by side. I don't think there's a closure in that interpersonal relationship. And I don't think that we'll ever be able to be because we will never exist in the same space again. But what I can do is I can find closure in my own dynamic relative to him. That's the type of grief work that I don't think it ever truly done. You just continue to kind of iterate on it because you're constantly changing. So your relationship to this entity, this memory, I guess, is how a lot of people like to think about it will always be changing.

 - Right, you don't just reach this point of closure and say, okay, I'm done.

 - Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, maybe some people do, but you're lying to yourself and have fun with that.

 - We've been having this conversation for a while and I never really asked you about how your dad died and whether that had any impact at all on the grief that you felt.


 - I think there's multiple ways in which the circumstance in which he died is relevant.

 Some of it is just the fact that it was such a shock because he was the one who wasn't supposed to die.

 My mother was the one who was supposed to die from young childhood. That's what she had always been saying. And she had had cancer a year before, not even really. Yeah, a year before she had a Chondrosarcoma bone cancer, super rare form that was most likely going to kill her. It didn't. There was a little bit of whiplash with that, which made it feel almost like this can't be, it can't be happening because it's the wrong storyline. It's the wrong person dying. It was just confusing a little bit to the brain. Further than that, it was the speed at which this had happened. So something that I think is kind of interesting in my father's story is the fact that he had a traumatic brain injury when he was 20, maybe 26, which also apparently fundamentally altered his personality. We were actually a lot more similar in personality, but I never met the version of him that had a more similar personality to me because the version of him I met was post-traumatic brain injury. And so he was very anti-Western medicine. He was a chiropractor.


 And besides, I think, going to the dentist a couple of times, he never went to a doctor between when he had his traumatic brain injury, which was the result of a motorcycle accident. When he was released from the ER, he never went back to the doctor, is my understanding. Until he got his initial radiology scans, which basically his stomach and his esophagus were littered with tumors. So he had cancerous tumors. He didn't see an oncologist for another month. And then he was gone. And so the whole thing was really fast. He could have chosen to die in a very different way. 

 - Mm-hmm.

 - Right, like he could have chosen to get his shit together. Like he didn't need to leave his life such a mess.

 - Hmm.

 - Like he chose not to do any form of treatment. He chose not to, he chose to die as quickly as possible. And because he chose to die as quickly as possible, that made my life easier.


 - Mm-hmm.


 - Because when he first found out, he was super encouraged. Like he was like, "I'll do UV light therapy and go on some cleanses and probably do ayahuasca and like heal myself." And he really did think that he was capable of doing that until about a month later when he finally went to see an oncologist. So we didn't have stage two, for a month. The oncologist said like, "If you were my brother, I would put you on chemo tomorrow. Honestly, I put you on chemo today." And for him, which I do feel like is his right, he was like, "Absolutely not, I don't want that poison in me." And he was like, "Well, what am I gonna get anyways?" Right, quality of life wise, he was like, "Well, maybe you'll get like six months-ish instead of four weeks." So from the perspective of his own autonomy...


 Great, like that's awesome. Like you should be able to choose those things for yourself. But from the perspective of his child, who was saddled with responsibility because of how he chose to die, because of how he chose to not ask one of his brothers or one of his friends to be the executor of his estate, or even to help his children in that process, it was so fast.


 Beginning of August, I was supposed to be moving to Alaska. So then he was like, "Yeah, go to North Carolina instead," which is where I was at at school at the time, which is still 500 miles away from him, not like 3000, but 500.

 And I distinctly remember him telling me, "I'm not dying, but I will call you if things change."

 And this was the last like lucid conversation I ever had with him. And then it wasn't but two weeks later that I got a call from my sister. By that point, once he, I think he kind of realized that he wasn't going to be able to heal himself, he did not want to be in this world anymore. If he could have had assisted suicide, I think he would have. I don't think he would have even waited for me to get back from North Carolina. And there's a lot of go in that. Like oftentimes, right, we talk about how like funerals and memorial services are for the living, not for the dead. The process of death is often also for the living. All of this like end of life, palliative care are often so that the living can process. And sometimes it's also so that the dying can process. Two, can get things together. He didn't give a shit. Maybe he did care, but the action stated that he did not. Choose to operate in a way that made it seem like he had any acknowledgement for how his death was going to affect anyone else besides himself.

 - Which I imagine created some resentment for one and also delayed your process, right? You had to start figuring everything out for months afterwards. 

- Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I had to take like a sabbatical from school and just handle all of the things and also learn like what I didn't know I needed to handle. Right, like there was no coaching through this process. It was just, okay, go do it. I wasn't even resentful for months. I wasn't angry. I was nothing. I didn't really have the ability to be anything besides like frustrated.

 And like angry, but more like angry at my mother, like not really even angry at my father. Like I just, I didn't even have the space to feel those emotions yet. All of that came at least six months after he died that I started to be resentful. And then even when I got older and older and older and realized how ridiculous it would be to ask someone to do that or not even ask just to expect them to handle it. And I think the icing on the cake of my frustration with that actually happened when a student of mine who was 19 lost her father. And this is someone I had known for a couple of years. I met her when she was 16 and I was just looking at her and we were talking about it. I was trying to be as supportive as I could for her. Her situation was different in how she lost her father, but it was still similar ages. And I looked at her and I was like, oh my God, like that's how old I was.

 - Mm-hmm, yeah. There's one last thing I wanted to ask you about. There's a line in your voicemail that I found really powerful and wanted you to expand on a little bit. You say that you are trying to be worthy of the love that your dad could not give you.

 - The term worthy there really like breaks my heart. It speaks to the fact that I obviously didn't think I was worthy. It implies a negative.

 You are worthy period is what I wish I had been taught. I thought that there was a segment of worthy that is you're worthy of your father's love. Like everyone's worthy of their father's love. I don't want it to be a question anymore.

 I just want the answer to be so universal. Like I was worthy of my father's love.

 Did I feel like that when I recorded that? No, I don't think I had done quite that work yet, but I do feel that way now.

 - The final line of your voicemail is this is for you and you are welcoming your audience, maybe even your dad to Voicemails for the Dead. Why did you want to make this podcast?

 - I have so many answers to this question. To not be him is the easiest answer. To give him a gift would be to not be him because he couldn't do that for me. I can choose to interact with my grief in a way that can potentially benefit other people. And I think ultimately what I really wanted to do was to just create a space to allow the language of like, it's okay to be angry at the dead. Like it's okay to not know how you feel. It's okay to postpone your grief for nine months or 20 years potentially. It's okay to hate this person. It's okay to feel so deeply relieved and happy, something that you would honestly argue is joyous upon their death. Like all responses and reactions to death are valid. I think that was just the ultimate goal was just to create a space that I wasn't exposed to at that time.

 - Thank you for opening that space to us and thank you for sharing your story.


 (gentle music)

 
- Special thanks this episode to Lorne Fultonberg. Our music is provided by Suboctave out of North Carolina. I'm Hailey Taymore Brown and thank you for joining us for our first ever pilot episode of "Voicemails for the Dead."


 If you'd like to leave a message for someone, please call the "Voicemails for the Dead" hotline at 720-828-2023.


 We'll see you on the other side.